It'll be a crime to miss sleuthing 'Veronica Mars'

Kristen Bell is cool, realistic and likable as Veronica in UPN's "Veronica Mars."

Kristen Bell is cool, realistic and likable as Veronica in UPN's "Veronica Mars."

Photo: Warner Bros.

Photo: Warner Bros.

Image
1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Kristen Bell is cool, realistic and likable as Veronica in UPN's "Veronica Mars."

Kristen Bell is cool, realistic and likable as Veronica in UPN's "Veronica Mars."

Photo: Warner Bros.

It'll be a crime to miss sleuthing 'Veronica Mars'

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

Every season, some shows just don't get the love they deserve, losing eyeballs to lesser entertainments. This season one of these could be "Veronica Mars."

It may get less attention than its 9 o'clock competition, "Clubhouse," which previewed Sunday but "premieres" tonight on CBS (KIRO/7). "Veronica" is on UPN (KSTW/11) and that's still a hard sell among viewers accustomed to the network stinking up the place.

In choosing between the two, most viewers likely will grant the baseball drama "Clubhouse" the first shot, especially if they read "Veronica Mars' " early comparisons to Nancy Drew.

But "Veronica Mars" already is showing signs of being network television's next "Buffy," only set in an oceanside community called Neptune. The similarity is in "Veronica's" vibe, if you will, emanating from a tough, emotionally battered heroine.

Veronica (Kristen Bell) displays far more awareness about how the world works than her peers and most of the adults around her. She earned that insight the hard way, after her best friend, Lilly, was murdered and her father, Keith (Enrico Colantoni), Neptune's former town sheriff, made Lilly's billionaire dad, Jake Kane, the prime suspect.

Two acts of social poisoning followed. The town drubbed Keith out of office, and Veronica's boyfriend, Duncan (Teddy Dunn), Lilly's brother, dumped her. As if that wasn't enough, she was drugged and raped at a party not long after these tragedies.

Right now, Veronica can only count on two people: her dad, the disgraced sheriff raising her by himself after her mother left -- possibly because of Kane -- and her new friend, Wallace (Percy Daggs III), a guy she saved from being taped to a flagpole. Soon there will be three, once Weevil (Francis Capra), the leader of the local motorcycle gang, comes around.

Any "Buffy" fan would recognize Veronica as the ultimate Scooby. She's an intelligent, resourceful snoop able to circumvent any number of technical roadblocks to pin down her quarry. Her situation has made her a social pragmatist; in her world, the sheriff's the enemy who laughed in her face as she tried to report her assault. The rich at the top of the town's social order are steely manipulators and, as you'll find out in tonight's episode, her fiercest allies are the kind of people everyone in town fears.

Plus, the acting's fantastic. The talented Bell, last seen in "Deadwood," makes Veronica cool, realistic and likable, and she and Colantoni create a wonderful father-daughter dynamic.

These are some of the reasons the show's a critical darling, appearing on a number of fall television "best" lists. It's also the drama a large segment of people will refuse to get; the ads only show us a teenage girl solving crimes. Then you have tonight's guest appearance by an overexposed and largely talent-free Paris Hilton and, boom, you've lost a good number of people with working brains.

But if you watched last week's preview, and enough Seattleites did to give KSTW the fourth highest UPN affiliate ratings in the nation, you know the series' secret. "Veronica Mars" is a mystery above all else, with a new crime to be solved each week and two questions underneath it all -- who murdered Lilly? And to a lesser extent, who raped Veronica?

More than this, the show is a study of class warfare and the distinctions between law and justice, with school lunch tables representing the power structure of the former, and everywhere else -- the beach, the streets, Mars' off-hours world -- illustrating how the latter plays out.

Hold all of this up to "Clubhouse" and its boy-meets-baseball heroes stories. Yes, there is something to celebrate in the notion that the actor playing 16-year-old Pete Young, Jeremy Sumpter, actually looks his age. The somewhat strange alliance between executive producers Aaron Spelling and Mel Gibson also invites a bit of rubbernecking.

Other than that, the premiere barely held much of interest beyond Young becoming a New York Empires batboy, getting ribbed by baseball star Conrad Dean (Dean Cain) and equipment manager Lou Russo (Christopher Lloyd) while his mother, Lynne (Mare Winningham), frets and whines at home, treating his older sister, Betsy (Kirsten Storms), like the tramp she expects her to be.

Last week, Young almost covered for a star player caught with steroids in his car; this week, he steals a suspect bat to protect his hero, Dean. I could analyze it further, but there's not a whole lot of depth to explore beyond the standard coming-of-age goulash. Besides, I'm falling asleep typing this.

Clearly, though, some people are going to enjoy "Clubhouse," especially viewers desperate for a break between the excitement on "NCIS" and "Judging Amy." But who knows? It's possible viewers will look for new television addictions on channels that previously wouldn't have entered their thoughts. How else to explain the popularity of a little show such as "Top Model"?

If that can make it, so can "Veronica Mars" and UPN's other top-notch fall offering, "Kevin Hill," premiering at 9 tomorrow on KSTW.

This is the drama built around Taye Diggs' extraordinary magnetism. There's something else about "Kevin Hill," though, that gives it a universal appeal. It could be the way the pilot balances workplace and social masculinity with a feminine vibe, taking aim upon the widest range of viewers. It could be Diggs' approach to single fatherhood in the city, a reality a lot of young men face but few shows portray with any internal range. It's difficult to put a finger on it.

Whatever it may be, the pilot's a winner. An attorney at the top of his game, Hill has to radically change his worldview when his cousin dies, leaving Kevin his infant daughter. So he leaves his demanding firm to join a small outfit headed by Jessie Grey (Michael Michele). Among the changes are switches in his client list; in the first episode, he takes charge of a civil suit a woman files against a sports star she accuses of sexual assault.

To keep the character from getting too soft too fast, Hill hires a gay nanny named George (Patrick Breen), who's equally in charge of teaching a player like Hill to embrace the level of maturity and responsibility the fates forced upon him. Breen is actually the secret weapon in this series, gently stealing the scene from Diggs any time the two of them share the space.

While worth a look tomorrow night, it's difficult to determine how well "Kevin Hill's" plot can develop after its pilot. Diggs' daddy routine has to be original enough to keep viewers engaged week after week. Then again, UPN has shown over the past couple of seasons that it knows its young, female audience better than it ever did in the past.

If that affectionate core of viewers helps "Kevin Hill" and "Veronica Mars" take off, this could be the season UPN truly becomes a weekly destination. Tune in ... and keep your fingers crossed.

Channel surfing

The new episode of "The Apprentice" airs at 9 tomorrow on KING/5 to make way for Thursday night's coverage of the presidential debate.